Wednesday, March 10, 2021

VINTAGE CAMPER MAKEOVER COMPLETE TOUR!

 Hey guys, welcome to 2021. Hope it's treating you well! 



This year is off to an exciting start because after ONE WHOLE YEAR (how?) we have finally completed our vintage camper remodel. 

For a little background - we bought this camper in 2019 for $600 with the plan to maybe turn it into a photo booth, maybe just a camper? Honestly we didn't think that we would even have time to touch it in 2020 because we were so busy with our photo booth business - Lamphouse Photo Co. 

WELP. 

With all events and weddings canceled in March 2020 we started work on our 1968 Play Mor 140. 

AND!

We documented the entire process on our YouTube channel: 

Trailer Trash to Treasure 

Which, (woo-hoo) just passed 1k subscribers! 


We worked on the camper every week and finished it almost exactly a year from when we started. 

Here's the before tour: 


First the exterior. Oof.



Poor guy had been given the rattle can mossy oak treatment and it was doing his cute shape NO favors. 

Next up, the "kitchen"

BIG USE OF QUOTATION MARKS THERE ; ) 


What's there to say, it was basically gone. Disintegrated. Like the little scalloped edge on the cabinet though so style points for that I guess. 

Here's the dinette that would fold down into a bed:


The other ~bed~


Would you sleep there? 

So we got to work with the help of my dad, Dave and mom, Connie and demolished the interior first:




We then took it down to the frame, rebuilt the walls, ceiling, stripped the skin and repainted the exterior and ta-da, here's the final product: 


The kitchen after: 





I think the kitchen might be my favorite part of the camper. 

We installed a new faucet, built upper and lower cabinets, added a water pump and water system and new hardware of course. 

Next up, the front "dinette"


We ended up opting for storage and turned the dinette into a permanent couch/bed. 

We're tent campers and we usually eat outside on a picnic table so we didn't think we would spend the time to convert it back and forth every day from a dinette to a bed. 



And finally, the bedroom:


Did I say the kitchen was my favorite? Maybe this is? Idk, I love it all.


Simon is a big fan of the big, fluffy bed:



The bed converts back into a couch area during the day to add a tiny amount of floor space, access to under the bed storage, and a nice seating area for meals or relaxing.


If you want to see how we rebuilt, repainted, re-everything'd this whole camper from the very beginning please head over to our YouTube channel Trailer Trash to Treasure and click the 'Start From the Beginning Playlist' 

We have another awesome project starting in a few weeks so hit that subscribe button and follow along on our next adventure! 

Until then, 

Keep Smiling!







Hardware (pulls & knobs)





Friday, December 25, 2020

Merry Christmas!

 Just wanted to pop in to say 'Merry Christmas!' and give a little update on how our year ended up. 


The last time I blogged, we had *just* barely started working on that camper up here ^
and what do you know, 9 months later and we're still working on it ; ) 

BUT

it's basically pretty much almost done! 

Just a few finishing touches here and there so no big reveal yet but here's a before and after of the kitchen: 


BEFORE (obviously!)



AFTER:



Can you BELIEVE??

I'm so excited to finish this project up with all of the fun stuff like storage, accessories, and decor but for now, I'll just tell you to head over to our YouTube Trailer Trash to Treasure to watch the whole remodel process and while you're there, give us a LIKE & SUBSCRIBE - that's all we want for Christmas! 

Thanks for reading. See you in 2021! 




Keep Smiling


Monday, April 20, 2020

Vintage Camper Remodel Update!

Hey guys! 

Had a minute before we got started working on our 1968 Play-Mor Model 140 vintage camper today so I thought I'd check in and give you some updates. 

If you saw our first video that I linked here last week, you know that we have already demolished the entire camper. Here's a peek at that process: 

Here's what the camper looked like on day 1: 


Then once the interior was removed, we took the walls and roof off (see that video here): 



And we were left with just the old rusty frame and rotten decking: 


After that, Conan pulled the old decking off (making meticulous notes of where everything would go back) and sanded, primed and painted the frame (here it is primed): 


That video is up on our YouTube (Trailer Trash to Treasure) if you want to check it out: 



Up next was rebuilding the old walls using the original studs as a frame to work off of: 


And that bring us to our most recent video:



Up next, the decking on the trailer frame gets rebuilt so that the walls can go back up and after that it's roof, wiring, insulation, skin. 

Easy peezy lol

So far it hasn't been too bad. The weather has held out for us most of the time (except for terrible allergies that we've all got - Simon included) and we're excited to start thinking of how the exterior is going to look and what the interior will be laid out like. 

We weren't really planning on making any changes to the interior layout - if it ain't broke - but we might have a couple of things that would make it a little more functional, we'll see. 

If you're seeing this and you haven't already - please go LIKE & SUBSCRIBE to our channel, Trailer Trash to Treasure. 

Until next time, 
Keep Smiling! 

Friday, April 10, 2020

We're On Youtube!

AHHH! 
A couple of posts ago I mentioned that we had purchased yet another vintage camper to fix up. Here she is, a 1968 Play-Mor Model 140: 
So ugly it's cute, right?
We honestly didn't think we'd have time to touch it with a busy season of events this spring and summer but guess what? We have some free time on our hands now (like it or not) and we figured what better way to get our minds off of things than to dig into a real project.
And because I like to double down on my challenges, I decided to film the process and put it on YouTube so you can follow along! 
Anywho, episode 1 is live on our Youtube Channel Trailer Trash to Treasure
It's going to be a unique project due to our current situation (i.e. we're unemployed for the forseeable future due to the ban on large public gatherings and thereby...photo booths ; ).
We're trying to get it frame off and put back together in 8 weeks on a shoestring budget and perhaps the biggest challenge - we can't just hop in the car and run to the lumber company every two hours. Should be interesting. 
Be sure to LIKE & SUBSCRIBE (wow, I feel so youtube-y saying that) so you can watch each episode. The plan is to put them out every Sunday night until we run out of stuff to show you which could be weeks or it could be years. Let's find out together! 
Keep Smiling!

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

The History of our House: 1917-1940 (The original owners!)

If you saw our last post, you know that something very exciting happened recently: 

We finally got down to the very first people that owned our house. If you've poked around the blog, you know that this has been an off and on project of ours for years. We did a little research here and there and were able to piece together a couple of things but never knew who the original owners were.

Until one month ago when I got an email from Meredith. It read:

...I've been researching your house and I stumbled upon your fixer upper blog yesterday. 
The reason I have been researching your house is because I've been researching the original owners - my ancestors. They purchased the house brand new in 1917 and lived there until 1940, when, as you know, the Muck family bought it. 

I have some newspaper clippings and some census and city directory records I'm sending you so you have this information. You have done amazing work fixing up this home and I'm sure the original owners would be proud. 

Bernard P. Cunningham
Mary Elizabeth (Sheahon) Cunningham (my 3rd great aunt)
Had 12 children
2 died in infancy
1 died of Spanish Flu at Fort Riley in 1918 (James)

WOW. Right?

Before we get into all of that, here's a quick refresher on what we already knew about the house's previous owners:

Present-2009

Us! (the home's sixth and current owners)


We purchased the house in April 2009. It had been vacant at that point for at least a couple of years. It had no heat, and several other issues.



Here's a little more about buying the house, an interior tour, and a nice roundup of projects through the years.

2000s-90s

(the home's fifth owners?)

A few years ago while painting the front porch with my mom, a woman came up with her son and said that she had lived in the house before us. I can't recall how long exactly she said but she gave some details of the house that confirmed she had lived in it.

1990s-1944

Larry (the home's third/fourth owners)

By complete accident and good fortune, we stumbled upon the next people to live in our house.


Conan worked for years and years at Moler's Camera digitizing slides and old photos.


One day in 2016 he was digitizing some pictures and saw something that looked familiar - our porch!
Larry in front of our (his) porch on a pony. 

He looked through more of the pictures and sure enough - it was our house!

Larry and other neighborhood children on our porch. 

He spoke to the man who was a little boy in the photos, Larry, who remembered his dad working on the house and making some additions here and there. The above photos were taken around 1946 and Larry said his family lived there until the 70s then he purchased the home from them and lived here until the 1990s.

See all of these incredible photos here.

1944-1940

The Muck Family (the home's second owners)

The Muck Family, l to r: Dan, Charles, Maude, Eva
Before Larry and his family, there were the Mucks.

The Muck family purchased the house in 1940 and lived there with their daughter Maude and son Charles.

Dan & Eva Muck on their wedding day, December 25, 1890

I was fortunate enough to get to speak with their granddaughter, Wilene who had done a lot of research on her own.

Dan Muck and his granddaughter Wilene

She recalled that her grandparents slept in the dining room of the house and she sometimes stayed up in the attic.

According to the census, they had 5 female boarders while living here.

1917-1940

The Cunningham Family (the home's original owners)

Here's where things get really interesting as we put the final puzzle piece of our home into place.


So, Meredith was researching her ancestors and came across our blog and decided to reach out with all of the amazing information she had found. With her permission, I'll share it with you here, paraphrasing her:

The home's original owners were Mary and Bernard Cunningham. They were married on April 21, 1884.


They were from Pottawatomie County, Kansas originally. They moved to Butler County around 1913, bought 160 farm acres near Augusta, Kansas (about 40 miles from here).

They discovered oil and gas on their land and became extremely wealthy as a result. Here's an interesting clipping renting that farm out years after they had moved to Wichita:


The home was built by L.H. Bump for a whopping $5,500 dollars. Here's an article about the building permit (he also built one other home in our neighborhood):


They moved to Wichita in 1917 and purchased our house brand new to live in with their children.



Then things took a turn

Sometime in 1919, Mary filed for divorce from Bernard on the grounds of extreme cruelty (see center column of clipping below:


Their son, Maurice testified that his father had choked his mother and then threatened to kill him with a butcher's knife.

Things got so bad that at one point, after the birth of another of their children, Mary fled the home and walked several miles to a neighbor's house for safety and sent the neighbor back to retrieve the baby.

And if that's not enough, Bernard had also held a loaded pistol to his daughter Grace's head at some point as well.

WOW.


Bernard's defense stated that he had moved into the garage to "obtain peace" but that when he returned to the house for meals someone was usually in his place at the table.

He claimed that it was Mary who had threatened to kill him due to the fact that he wanted to leave Wichita and return home to Augusta.


The divorce was finalized, with Mary receiving the house (now our house), half of their assets, royalties from the oil on their old farm, and custody of the children.


Bernard moved just down the street to 245 N. Chautauqua where he lived until his death on April 5, 1922, just two years after their divorce was finalized. The executor of his estate, his brother, reported that his children entered the home within a few hours of his death and stole personal property valued at $1891.

Among the things they stole:

A Dodge sedan
Diamond pin
Watch
Overcoat
Silverware
Two bedspreads
and a razor


All of Bernard's children testified against him in the divorce case. He had about $40,000 of property when he died and he gave $4,000 each to his brother and sister and the rest was placed in a trust for his children.

Mary lived in the house until 1940 and then it was sold to the Muck family. Mary lived with her daughter Grace until her death in 1949.

So...yeah. That's A LOT.

When you think of researching your home or in our case, someone else researching their ancestry and finding you (!) - you never really think it will be anything as interesting as this.

Time after time, we've been handed these gems of history by people who have gone out and done the legwork and research.

In Wilene's case, she researched her family and put it out onto the internet for us to find through findagrave.com and in Meredith's case, she did an EXHAUSTIVE amount of research into her family's history and in doing so, found us!

We are so so so so grateful to them both for helping us piece together the history of our house which is now complete and we're doing our part by putting it here for someone to find someday hopefully!

Hopefully, someday Meredith will be able to connect with us in person and see the house. When she does, we have some trash we'd like to give her that belonged to her ancestors ; )

If you'll recall, when we were remodeling the upstairs bathroom we found some very old trash in the garbage chute under the stairs. Read all about it here


the tobacco tin up there is stamped with the date 1919 so it likely belonged to some member of her family. That was our first clue that our house was likely built before the year on the deed - 1920.

Just a neat little tidbit!

Thanks for reading and keep smiling!


Friday, March 27, 2020

SINCE YOU BEEN GONE

So um...It's been A WHILE.

So long in fact, that we were able to create an entirely new person, keep it alive over a year and live to tell about it ; ) 

Introducing, to the Keep Smiling family, Simon Yale Fugit:



Born January 1, 2019
10:39 AM
3 lbs. 15 oz, 16 in.

As you can maybe tell from the weight up there, lil' Simon wasn't supposed to show up on New Year's Day. His due date was actually February 12th but our doctors decided he needed to be a New Years baby so here we are.


He spent 21 days in the NICU but at last check up, he was over 20 lbs. and doing awesome. He's now walking, talking, and getting into everything (including dirt - see mouth in below pic ; ).



That sort of set the tone for the whole year - a whirlwind. Read on to see what else we did that was...surprising...or not depending on how well you know us ; ) 

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Little Lampy Camper Before and After

If you're here looking for posts about working on an old house, I hate to disappoint you but once again we're talking about old campers. If you want to look at old houses, just scroll down a little bit and you've got about 7 years worth of stuff to fill your time with BUT if you want to see some photos of a really cute camper, you're in luck! 

After five months (almost to the day) of non-stop, all consuming work on our most recent camper purchase we finally finished it and rolled it out to its first event as a photo booth here in Wichita on December 16, 2017. 

If you'll recall, this was the BEFORE: 

(yeesh)

and here's the AFTER: 


It was a real process this time, folks. If you've been around these parts for the past 5 years you might remember us fixing up our first camper, "Lampy" to put a studio and darkroom inside. We eventually converted it to digital but then we had all of this extra space that we didn't need so we decided to scale down when we found this new camper for a steal at $600.

In spite of being about 6 feet shorter, this new camper was AT LEAST as challenging mostly due to the fact that there was nary a straight line on it. The first camper was much more boxy so framing wasn't as difficult. This one's "canned ham" shape meant replacing rotten wood that was bent and built in a factory 70 years ago was...difficult to say the least ; ) I would estimate that about 70% of those 5 months was spent re-framing the camper. 

All told, we ended up spending about $3,600 on renovating the camper inside and out. 


We scraped all of the old paint off using aircraft stripper (nasty stuff)...


My parents removed pretty much every piece of the skin of the camper to get to the old rotten framing and replace it. 


We started with this: 


Then came this: 


Then we lost the floor somehow: 


But eventually got things back in order and framed up: 


 And now...the back (or bedroom area) finished:

Lamphouse Photo Booth Co.

And the "dining" area before:


And after:

Lamphouse Photo Booth Co

So, there it is - the Little "Lampy" Camper. We even had a friend of ours that is a sign painter do hand lettering on the back. It's darn cute: 


If you're in the mood, there's even more photos on the Lamphouse website here.

We learned a lot from our first attempt at this five years ago that helped us make this one even better and *hopefully* longer lasting. We're really excited to get it out in the spring and fall to some weddings around Kansas and let people enjoy it like they did the original camper. 



Who knows if we'll get back around to house projects now that this is complete. Lord knows we need to get back to painting the house like, YESTERDAY so maybe that will get some more attention when it warms up outside or who knows, maybe we'll just throw a couple of sleeping bags in the camper and take a much needed vacation...



Until next time, Keep Smiling! 
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